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Posts by Emma Martin

Liverpool’s ethnology collections hold a small number of objects relating to the voyages of Captain James Cook (1728-1779). Cook made three voyages to the Pacific and Americas collecting both new knowledge, and also objects and specimens. Read more…

Chrissy Partheni, Head of Museum Partnerships has been working in Ethnology to widen her curatorial skills. She has recently started to document a fascinating collection from northeastern India and here she gives us an insight into the objects she is working with: Read more…

It would be very difficult for us to document the many thousands of objects we have in our collections without the help of our volunteers. Mark Jones has been working on the Japanese sword collections for nearly two years and he wanted to share his interest in one of the collection’s most important collectors: Read more…

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No its…a woman in a sari! There are so many stories that capture the imagination in World Museum’s summer exhibition, ‘Telling Tales: The Art of Indian Storytelling’, from the heroic Hanuman to the gorgeous, but every so slightly mischievous, Krishna. One of my personal favourites features not an heroic God from a Hindu epic, but instead an astronaut. Sunita Williams, the Indian-American astronaut, inspired one of the exhibition’s featured artists, Teju Ben to create a whole series of works on her adventures in space for our collection. Read more…

My final week of research has brought me to Gangtok, the state capital of Sikkim. Its a marked contrast to Kalimpong, here you are closer to the mountains, despite being in almost tropical jungle. The town is perched on a wooded valley hillside and looks out over rice paddies, that are just being harvested, and two important monasteries, Rumtek and Lingdum. Sikkim is wealthy in comparison to other hill states in India and the place has the feel of an English spa town. My work here will centre on the Namgyal Institute of Tibetology and the State Archive and already the work is going well. Everything stopped for a couple of days as Diwali was celebrated across India. The Festival of Lights is a time of pujas to Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, and also a good excuse for families to get together and set off fireworks. These could be seen and heard across the town and for those wanting an early night’s sleep, a very decent pair of earplugs was essential. Read more…

Following the mad panic that always ensues at the end of a bout of archive fever, I managed to complete a good chunk of my research in the Delhi archives and have now moved up to the Northeast of India and to the mountains of West Bengal and Sikkim.

The work here is a little different in that I’m now trying to find the descendants of some of the men I have been reading about in the archives and also get a feel for the area Charles Bell worked in. My first stop was Darjeeling, where I spent a couple of days visiting places where Bell and the 13th Dalai Lama had stayed and visiting a photography studio that had a number of interesting historical photograph taken at the time Bell was there. The area is surrounded and dominated by the Khangchendzonga range, this is the third highest mountain in the world and as the temperatures have dipped for winter, there is a good covering of snow on the mountain tops. This is the perfect time of year to visit as the day are warm, and the views, as you can see, are very clear out to the mountains. Read more…

Working through the vast archives of the National Archives of India is a lonely business. Very few people in the world get as excited as you do about the details and stories you find and so when elation strikes having found information on a Tibetan man you knew very little about, it’s not possible to run round the archives telling everyone you meet about your exciting discovery.

The disease only found amongst archival researchers is commonly known as ‘archival fever’ and there is no known cure. I’ve had several of those experiences during the past three weeks of intensive scanning of catalogues and documents from the Foreign and Political records of British India in the early 20th century. It is here that I have gained a much clearer picture of Sir Charles Bell, his networks and his personal commitment to Tibet. Read more…

As I mentioned in my previous post, I am currently in India undertaking research on the Tibet collections held at National Museums Liverpool. Upper Dharamsala or Mcleod Ganj is home to the 14th Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Government-in-Exile and it is here that many cultural and governmental institutions were rebuilt after 1959 when many Tibetans including the Dalai Lama came to this small hill station to seek refuge.

Here you will find government offices, libraries and museums and a focus for many Buddhist pilgrims from around the world; the Tsuklagkhang. In exile the Tsuklagkhang has become a focus for Tibetan Buddhist practice and in many ways acts as a replacement for the Jokhang, the seventh century temple which sits at the very heart of Lhasa in Tibet and is considered the most important Buddhist site for Tibetans.

The Tsuklagkhang complex is home not only to the Dalai Lama’s official residence, but also the Tibet Museum, which tells through personal stories, photographs and video installations the events that changed individual Tibetans lives and choices and sacrifices those people made to reach India. I was impressed with the way those individual stories acted as symbols for the stories of many Tibetans who had made those journeys and unlike most museums I visit I read every word! Read more…

It has been over two weeks since I set out for India to undertake research on the Tibet collections held at National Museums Liverpool. It has been a very busy couple of weeks.

I began my research in New Delhi and the National Archives of India. Here, there are held hundreds of thousands of records relating to the British Empire in India. Of particular interest to me are the many hundreds of records relating to Sir Charles Bell, a colonial officer based in Sikkim, a small Himalayan state on the Northeast frontiers of India tucked in between Nepal and Bhutan. It was from here that Bell worked as a diplomatic agent for the British Indian government developing and maintaining relationships with Sikkim, Bhutan and Tibet. During the twenty years he worked in the area he learnt the Tibetan language, understood, more than most, Tibetan culture and protocols and became a friend of the 13th Dalai Lama, Thubten Gyatso. Read more…

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